I was tossing and turning during the wee hours of the night a while back. (I’ve found that the early AM hours are the time when the ego does its worst work.) This sort of sleeplessness has assailed me before. I awaken abruptly and lie there for hours completely overrun with thoughts like, “what if this happens or what if that doesn’t work?” -the kind of thoughts that don’t even occur during day time hours but feel overwhelming at night. My habit in the past has been to lie awake feeling completely at the mercy of such thoughts and pray for daylight so that I can escape them into my busy schedule.

But this time was different.

This time when the ego voice awoke me at 3 AM and started in on its predictable rant I recognized its voice and didn’t take it quite so seriously. It still held sway for awhile, going on about about how dire my life situation is, but this time I didn’t lose sight of who it was in me that was carrying on with such nay-saying. I decided to ask for help.

I sat up in bed, turned on my bedside lamp and reached for the bible which happened to be lying on a table near by. I sat with the bible on my lap a few minutes and asked to be guided with words that would help me deal with the negative fear-mongering ego that lives in my own head. I closed my eyes and opened the bible.

When I opened my eyes the first words I saw was the beginning of a psalm that said, “Praise the Lord.”I felt an immediate relief upon reading the words and thought, “OF COURSE that’s the answer to ego’s ranting!”

Praise generates gratitude; it uplifts the spirits and raises our vibrational frequency to a higher vibratory level that attracts love and abundance. Gratitude defeats ego completely because it is of a much higher frequency. Ego cannot thrive in the high vibrational frequency generated by praising Source.

With that awareness in mind, I started whispering an improvised song of thanksgiving for the over flowing abundance in my life. Peace and quiet joy descended. I did not go back to sleep. I did not need to. I was so filled with gratitude that I felt eager to start my day. And it turned into a wonderful day – as days generally are when I start out in an attitude of gratitude.

What is the lesson? Simply this; gratitude is the antidote for fear or any stressful feeling. Use it ceaselessly.

The next time anxiety producing thoughts threaten to take you down, remember that it is the ego that produces fear – always. and turn to thoughts of gratitude immediately. Find reasons to be grateful in everything you do and in everything that happens. Refuse to hang out with the dark thoughts of an angst producing ego and you will find yourself held in the hands of an abundant universe.

I’ve been asked to say something about the shocking events of the school shooting tragedy in Connecticut this past week where at least 27 people died at the hands of an immature child, albeit in a man’s body. How can we perceive the tragedy in Connecticut in a way that brings anything but terror and outrage, much less be able to explain it to our children?

I do not know.

I have found, however, that truth usually comes in simple answers … but that doesn’t mean getting there from where we are is easy.

I did what I tend to do whenever I am pondering an important question, I took it into my daily practice, where I can count on receiving the real scoop, that inner guidance and much needed “upper wisdom,” as I like to quip when referring to my consultations with Source. I asked for a higher understanding of the horrendous happenings of last Friday’s events, and was given what I share with you below. It is the gist of the “download” I received:

We deal with world tragedy by allowing what we experience to affect us so deeply that we are changed forever, for the better, by its happening. Otherwise lives lost in tragedy die in vain. Unless we can take meaning from the lives spent, they are spent for nothing.

But when we find meaning, especially meaning that furthers the cause of love, forgiveness and/or a transformed world consciousness, then those lives are NOT lost for nothing, were not lived in vain, but instead, become lives lived for a bigger purpose.”

Our challenge then is to see these innocent children, and adults, who died that day, as more than victims, to see them as inadvertent messengers instead, who, through their death, deliver a wake up call to our nation for the cause of peace.

We cannot change what happened. We can, however, decide whether to let it embitter us into becoming vigilantes, for instance, set on revenge, hardened by life, or fixated on finding who, or what, is to blame for this heinous crime, … or to allow ourselves to move to higher ground and a perspective of peace, that comes from seeking meaning, wisdom, forgiveness, and understanding from what appears to be the worst imaginable happening possible.

Sometimes our darkest hour is the one that enlightens us most.

To make that shift to higher spiritual ground, however, we must first understand that blame will not get us there.

For instance, to blame the “evil kid” whose parents “did not raise him right,” to fault the school who “should have been better protected,” to blame lenient gun laws, or to to blame any external factor at all for that matter, as the cause for this unspeakable horror, will not bring resolve or peace – nor can we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that any of the things we blame as ’causes’ are anything more than ‘grasping at straws.’

We cannot know absolutely that any of these things caused the tragedy, and therefore to get caught up in fighting against some perceived cause that requires us to live in a state of resistance can, if we’re not careful, take us down an emotional slippery slope that lands us in the lowlands of “Shouldville,” where blame prevails, and peace cannot exist. (“He should’ve, they shouldn’t have, the laws should be …” – this is the language of a victim in blame, and it only drives the victim triangle, it does not get us off of it.)

The tragedy was caused by one thing really, and one thing only. That thing is the same thing that lies behind every act of violence since the beginning of time. What caused that terribly confused young man to do what he did was that he believed his own distorted, and insane, thinking.

It was the terribly limiting and painful beliefs that he blindly believed, and never questioned, that caused him to feel what he did and prompted his desperate behavior. It was his own life-destroying beliefs that generated his overwhelming feelings of self-annihilation, desperation, and hatred for himself, that then culminated in the dither of internal pain that fast spiraled into what became a homicidal, suicidal rage.

We know that internalized beliefs are the one cause that lies at the root of all tragedy because Reality tells us it is so. The guiding principles of Reality remind us that people (every single person, no exception) do what they do because they believe what they think, which then generates the feelings that go with those beliefs, and prompts them to act in ways that prove their painful beliefs to be true.

For instance, in the case of someone like the young man who killed those twenty-six people that day, we might guess,with some degree of probability that someone who is willing to destroy life (their own or others) is living in a tormented mental state. They are believing torturous thoughts for sure, even though we may not know exactly what those are.

Perhaps that person believes that the world has rejected them, or they may see themselves as a victim of irreparable damage that, in their mind, justifies feelings of revenge, and prompts striking back, much like a wild animal who feels cornered, might do. Such a person might feel compelled to try and make others hurt the way they feel they’ve been hurt, and so lash out in rage. People who believe these kinds of thoughts can easily become violent to themselves and others, which induces the world, in turn, to give them the rejection and pain they expect, thus proving their distorted beliefs to be true.

We don’t really know what thoughts someone may be believing, but we can tell by the vibrational frequency of their actions, what the emotional quality of a person’s thoughts are, whether they are hi-frequency beliefs that inspire acts of love, compassion, & kindness, or whether they are painful low-frequency beliefs that bring death and destruction to those who believe them.

When we understand that it’s the way we think, and not external things or circumstances, that drive our feelings and behavior, it gives us just a bit more compassion for those who suffer terribly dark beliefs, because, who among us really, is not capable of such distorted thinking? Who among us has not acted in some self-destructive, or painful way, even hurting others as a result of some confused idea we falsely believed? (although, hopefully, we did not resort to the kind of devastation that the youth in Connecticut did.)

But what about the innocents involved, you ask? What about the twenty children, under the age of 10, who were killed by this mad man’s distorted thinking … how do we make peace with that? How do we explain that to our children, so that they are not afraid to go to school, or to face the world at all?

Again, the truth is simple, though not necessarily easy. We must remind ourselves, and our children, that no life is lived in vain. Not even a drug addict who dies on the street, not even a child who dies at birth, and certainly not twenty precious children, and their six adult caregivers, who lived quiet, mostly unassuming, lives right up to the moment they died highly public deaths.

We can only assume, in a world where there are no coincidences (as made obvious by the law of cause and effect), that we were supposed to witness these happenings. Why would I say that? Because we did. To think it should not have happened is to take up mental residence in “Shouldville,” a place that does not exist in Reality.

Reality does not heed our shoulds and should nots, have you noticed? I certainly have. Where do all these shoulds/should nots come from anyway, if not from a mind in resistance to Reality? Truly. What does “should” have to do with what is. Doesn’t it just keep us in resistance to believe Reality should be different? Reality is what it is, and it is up to us to make peace with it, or not.

Resistance to what is will not change Reality, but it will make us miserable.

Acceptance (not to be confused with liking or condoning it) will not change Reality either, but it does makes inner peace possible.

And so again, the question is, will you see it in a way that evolves your consciousness, and makes it possible for you to abide in a state of love and forgiveness, or will you see these events through the lens of a victim who sees only the horror and pain, and leads to a state of hopelessness and caustic grief?

One brings peace, the other suffering. It is up to you.

What we each decide will determine whether we find peace in the midst of what happened, or whether we simmer along in a state of inconsolable fear that we end up passing onto others too, inflicting upon them our rants against the cruelty and unfairness of life.

One engenders serenity, the other fear.

Again, only because it bears repeating, the choice is our own. What will we do with the reality of what we have witnessed? What will WE believe, feel and react out of concerning the deaths of so many innocent lives? What will we choose to believe about what it means? Will we be changed for the better, or for the worse?

These are the questions placed before me in my daily practice this morning, and I put them before you now.

My reflections on these questions allowed me to recognize that if we see these innocent lives as having been wasted, we may suffer much more than if we choose to see them as lives sacrificed for a world in need of awakening.

To believe a thing happened needlessly, without reason, creates great suffering. Whereas we can perhaps find some beginning semblance of a return to peace when we believe these deaths might be serving a higher purpose. To reduce the lives of those who died to that of being nothing more than victims of needless acts of violence, whose deaths serve no purpose other than as proof that the world has grown wildly insane with cruelty and senseless acts of hate, is to sorely limit our capacity for faith in a Source that can take even the most heinous crime and use it to bring us closer to Love and Higher Truth.

Such limited perception leaves no room for peace at all. Instead such thoughts take us to blame and anger and a sense of impotence that is debilitating. I see no peace in such an inner state, I see only fear and resistance there, that, like a viral infection spreads inner suffering, to become like a malignancy taking over our spiritual consciousness. (‘What we focus on gets bigger, or ‘what we resist persists,’ is yet another observed principle of Reality.)

We can choose to see these bright lives as shining stars, who, through their death, continue to motivate us as individuals, and as a nation, to awaken to love and forgiveness and to inspire us to reach for something better, to perceive it in a way that allows us to look back on this event and say we were changed for the better for having known about it; that inspires us to find within ourselves the fearful thoughts that drive our own craziness, and to question them; to inquire into the angry, hurt, fear generating thoughts that these events arouse in us, and by so-doing, raise our own vibrational frequency towards revolutionizing the consciousness of our planet, starting with just one mind at a time – our own.

For myself, I have chosen not to let this event taint my love of others, even those who believe horribly confused, distorted thoughts that drive them to behave in devastating ways. I choose instead to allow those in confusion to show me where in me such darkness still has a foothold so that I can shed the light of consciousness on those shadowy beliefs, uplift them, and become a more consciously loving person for having done so.

I refuse to see a single life as having been lived in vain, or to believe that a single death was without purpose. I choose instead, to adjust my own thinking to a higher emotional frequency as a way of modeling what’s needed in the world. And I invite you to join me in these personal efforts to transform the world from the inside out , not by changing the world, but by changing one mind at a time – starting with the only mind we can truly change, our own.

Healthy boundaries are not as much about drawing lines in the sand that then must be boldly defended, as they are the natural result of a mindset that comes from believing that we are safe, loved, and deserving of kindness and respect.

If we expect to be mistreated, perhaps because that’s what we have experienced in the past, we will react defensively, which often comes across as disrespectful to others – certainly, if we anticipate violation of our space or person, we make unhappy assumptions about what we deserve from others and so think less of ourselves which prompts us to treat ourselves poorly.

We resort to ultimatums delivered to those we feel mistreated by, demanding that they treat us the way we think we should be treated – even though, we ourselves do not treat ourselves in the ways we say we want them to treat us. And we fail to understand that those who violate our space are reflecting to us the way we mistreat ourselves. (The world IS a mirror …)

No matter how many ultimatums we may deliver (this being what boundary setting so often turns into), they will go right on reflecting back to us the poor way we treat ourselves. That is their job, for how else are we going to realize how we mistreat ourselves except it be so graphically demonstrated for our “viewing pleasure” by those who dare to treat us the way WE do.

Even our abusers and boundary-violaters are messengers and way-showers for us – should we choose to recognize it.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that we should tolerate violation … of any sort! That is not helpful AT ALL.

However this notion of “setting boundaries” (another way of describing an attempt to control their response towards us so that we can feel better), while understandable, is not really the most effective way to get the job done – mostly because “establishing boundaries” often requires constant vigilance to be sure they are honored, so we are often defensive and “on guard” with those we perceive as mistreating us.

The simple truth is that if we do not model proper respect for ourselves to those around us, there are no amount of “boundaries” we can “set” that will have a lasting effect.

Fortunately there is a better, more long-lasting approach …

It is this: We must question any concept that keeps us from believing that we deserve the love and respect we want from them. It is a natural occurrence that when we treat ourselves as if we deserve kindness and respect, we model what we want from them. We TEACH them how to treat us.

When we act according to a set of beliefs that say we respect and love ourselves, we transmit that message to them. Because the world is a mirror with the assignment of showing us what we believe so we can notice the effect of those beliefs on us, when we are kind to ourselves, others will reflect that kindness and respect back to us through their interactions with us. (Remember, people live up to our expectations of them.)

Sometimes there is concern expressed that we might actually mislead or make matters worse by looking for the gifts in every situation, especially when we’re seeking the positives in painful relationships with those who may NOT have our best interest in mind. The concern is that seeking to find gratitude for such situations in our lives might mislead us into rationalizing and/or denying injustice and abuse when what we need to be doing is protecting ourselves.

Indeed there is a fine line for many in making the distinction between rationalizing as a way of denying danger as opposed to finding the gift in painful situations … so I appreciate the word of caution.

And I want to clarify for those of you who may have wondered similarly by first asking a couple of questions for you to consider?

The questions:

Is it true that we cannot find or focus on the gifts we received in a painful situation without denying the possibility of it being a dangerous one for us?

Is it true that it is safe only to appreciate the relationships in our life with those whose intentions we trust are honorable?

A brief, but relevant, aside:

Do you know the story about the scorpion and the frog?

It is this:

The scorpion was drowning and begged the frog, who is not threatened by water, to give him a ride to dry land… but the frog refused, saying,”You will sting me if I help you!” “Oh no,” said the scorpion, “I would never hurt you, why, I would be so grateful to you for saving my life that we’d be best friends forever!”

Finally against the frogs better judgment, he consented to give the scorpion a ride on his back to dry land. Well, sure enough, as the scorpion slid off the frog’s back onto dry land, he gave him the frog a killing sting.

The frog, in the throes of dying, cried out, “WHY did you sting me after I helped you? I risked my life for you and this is the thanks I get?!”

To which the scorpion replied, “It’s simple … I did what I did because I am a scorpion, and that’s what scorpions do!”

Now, regarding the story’s relevance to the questions asked above:

The story reminds us that all of us, people and scorpions alike, do what we do because we believe what WE think. How “safe” or “dangerous” we are to ourselves and others is determined by our own belief system – it’s our beliefs that determine our nature.

That means if someone believes they must hurt others to be safe or to prosper, they will treat them in hurtful, destructive ways .. i.e. they will be hurtful and abusive to those around them.

Does this mean we must withhold our love from them?

Might it be possible to understand that a person’s misbehavior is not AT or TO us, but that they treat us the way they do simply because they believe their own distorted thoughts? How would knowing that affect the way I see them? Feel towards them? Treat them?

I have experienced that we can remain loving and kind to them without putting ourselves in danger to do it. Sort of like if Mr Frog had said, “I understand you are a scorpion and I know that means you will have to do what scorpions do, and I do not need to judge you for that, but, nor am I willing to endanger myself by giving you a ride on my back … not because I don’t respect or care about you, but simply because my job is to love and take care of me.”

We can take care of ourselves, say no when we need to take care of ourselves, and STILL not need to attack or blame or feel victimized by the “scorpions” in our life – who, after all, are just being true to their own nature based on what they believe they must be and do to survive, just like the rest of us are doing too.

Here’s what Reality teaches us:

There is not a single person in our life that is not there by design. There are no coincidences. And since Reality is ALWAYS working with us, for us, we can totally rely on knowing that the people in our life (both positive and negative) are there to bring us gifts – of insight, awareness, comparison, or in endless ways that are too many to count… It is up to us to reap the harvest – but if we are busy judging, blaming, defending ourselves from them, as if we made some kind of terrible mistake to have landed them in our life, we will not be able to harvest these gifts and growing opportunities.

It boils down to this:

We are energetic beings. What that means is that we automatically attract to us the people and situations that are a frequency match to our own belief-created frequency. If we have painful beliefs that say we are worthless, for instance, or that says people can’t be trusted not to hurt us, then we will transmit an emotional frequency that will unfailingly attract to us the kind of person who will demonstrate or play out for us those unhappy beliefs. In other words, they will treat us in ways that prove us right!

When we begin to understand that there is no coincidence about who is in our life, when we come to see that the people and situations we have in our life are here as mirrors that reflect our own limiting, self-destructive thoughts and beliefs, then we can choose not to resist them, and we can instead start using our encounters with them as opportunities to clear and refine our own belief system.

THIS is when we come to appreciate the many ways they serve us, regardless of how they treat us! It does not mean we have to tolerate, minimize, deny, or justify abuse … it just means we do not have to turn them into enemies.

Accepting their gifts has nothing to do with denying their unkind nature, nor do we need to allow them to hurt us – it is our job to protect us, not theirs. After all, why would we, in being kind and loving to ourselves, allow anyone, including ourselves, to hurt us?

Accepting the gifts that come from dysfunctional relationship is to understand that we attract these people into our life, not because we are stupid, weak, or sick, but because, seeing our own unkind beliefs play out in a physical relationship with another is the way the world works with us to help us elevate our own consciousness.

I often am asked questions about how the guiding principles apply in the case of truly traumatic life happenings, such as the holocaust, etc … Or as one student put it, “How does the construct of a transformational approach to the “victim triangle” address and apply in situations of such severity ?

I always appreciate the opportunity to expand on this important issue because it is one that confuses many – this distinction between victim and victim consciousness – and so bears exploring.

To begin with … there are true victims in the world – victims of war, rape, disease, natural disaster, starvation, poverty – the list goes on. There is no intention in this approach to undermine the reality of real life victims.

However, what this approach allows us to understand is that we have a choice about whether or not we will go into victim consciousness. That is always our choice. We choose how we feel and how we will respond to the circumstances life presents us. We learn that it is not about what happens to us, but about what we do with what happens to us in our own mind – it’s our attitude about it, or mind-set, that determines our internal victim status. This inner mental state is what determines whether we are in victim consciousness or not.

The things that happen to us do not define us unless we choose to define ourselves by them.

Often, I am asked questions about how the Jews, for instance, could have seen themselves as anything but as victims. There is a simple answer, although not necessarily an easy thing to do. The answer is this: They, like you and me, get to choose to see what happened to them in ways that built inner strength, faith, and love, rather than to see themselves as victims, no matter how justified they might be in claiming so. (Indeed it is well-established, that many of the Holocaust survivors DID indeed report that their decision to adapt to reality was what saved them)

Read “The Search for Meaning” written by Victor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived concentration camps after losing his whole family, as one description of a man who chose an alternative to victimhood. Dr Frankl’s book describes how he survived the experience of life in a concentration camp and then went on to develop a style of therapy based on what he learned from his experience there about accepting Reality.

Another example is the movie, “It’s A Beautiful Life, ” a beautifully imaginative movie describing a creative way of doing something about one’s own victim status. It’s a movie made many years ago about a father who used his acting talents to spare his small son from the trauma of living in a concentration camp …

Examples like these demonstrate for us that it’s in the way we frame life, not in what happens to us, that we find peace, and freedom from the suffering that we cause ourselves.

Rather than being a victim to our life circumstances, we can choose to see our life situations, and the troubling relationships we have with others, as opportunities to learn more about the nature of our own relationship with ourselves and the world at large.

When we come to see the world is my mirror instead of focusing on how we’ve been victimized, we quickly come to recognize that whenever we are resisting, or blaming something outside ourselves for our unhappiness we are in victim consciousness.

When, for example, we are bitter, angry, or when we blame the world for the bad things that happen to us, we transmit an energy that vibrates on that anger frequency … should we be surprised then, when what we get back from life is anger from those around us?

Of course, the world being the reflective surface that it is, we will go on attracting people who are bitter, angry and blaming towards us, as long as we, ourselves hold onto a way of seeing the world that generates anger, hurt, and blame.

Instead we can learn to take that thing, whatever it is, that we are blaming for robbing us of peace in the moment, and look at it instead from the angle of asking what part of our own mind treats us (and others) in the same way that we find ourselves so offended by here.

Rather than to bemoan life’s happenings, use them as grist for the mill of refining your own consciousness – there is no victim left … and that’s makes the real difference: a victim who refuses to see themselves as a victim is no longer a victim – no matter what their outer circumstances may be.